Image:Leonard Wood 1903.jpg

"Leonard Wood - Maverick in the Making 1882-1921" (1860–1927) by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) oil on canvas, 1903 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Leonard Wood had won the American [Congressional Medal of Honor]] fighting Apaches in the southwest. On meeting him, en:Theodore Roosevelt would write from Washington in 1897, "I have developed a playmate in the shape of Dr. Wood of the Army, an Apache campaigner and graduate of Harvard, two years later than my class.... "Last Sunday he fairly walked me down in the course of a scramble home from Cabin John Bridge down the other side of the Potomac over the cliffs."

Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood liked each other from their first meeting that spring. Both were robust and athletic, and both, from the vantage points of their respective jobs — Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy, and Wood as an army officer (and personal physician of President and Mrs. William McKinley) — took a belligerent attitude toward Spain with respect to Cuba. When Roosevelt was offered the chance to raise a regiment of volunteer cavalry, he in turn recruited the more experienced Wood to be the regiment's colonel and commander. After the war in Cuba, Wood remained as military governor of Santiago, and shortly thereafter was appointed to administer to the affairs of the entire island.

John Singer Sargent painted this portrait of Wood in 1903, when he went to Washington to do the official portrait of President Roosevelt. Sargent recalled then that the two veteran Rough Riders enjoyed competing against each other with fencing foils.

Public Domain Source URL http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/roosevelt/wood.htm

Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here.

2006-02-28 (original upload date)

Original uploader was SimonATL at en.wikipedia

PD-US.